AT&T DEALS WITH BIG business customers, when it comes to its presence in Canada. Enormous really.
Multi-national companies with complex, global communications needs for many thousands of employees are AT&T’s focus – beyond its massive consumer presence in the U.S., of course. Altogether, it is the world’s largest telephone company.
The company recently opened a brand new data centre in Toronto, which will not only help Canadian enterprises, but global companies, which will use the data centre for various hosting duties.
Upon the opening of the new data centre late last month, AT&T’s regional vice-president Andrea Messineo (pictured below) chatted with Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien to talk enterprise telecom, in Canada and around the world, with a special focus on network security. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation, which also included Stan Quintana, vice-president of AT&T Security Services.
Greg O’Brien: What will the data center here in Canada allow you to do for Canadians and for other companies abroad?
Andrea Messineo: Well, if customers are adamant about having their applications hosted in Canada because of disaster recovery, or business continuity, now it allows us to actually give them space and manage services on Canadian soil versus hosting it someplace else in the world. And then services, you know our Internet Protect as well as a lot of the managing security services, will be available through a combination than having them reside in the Canadian data center, but having the opportunity to select those services anywhere in the world for the Canadian-based companies.
GOB: What are these multi-national businesses telling you that they need from their telecom provider?
AM: Well, I guess it’s several areas. We’ve done a lot of research… and they need the converged pure network, they need us to be able to ensure that as they converge applications and the networks when they start collecting where in the world they want those applications to reside. And… some customers are collapsing hundreds of data centres to less than five.
And they’re selecting one or two sites in the world where we’re going to build host or global applications. So, they need the ability to put those on a converged IT backbone. And then they need security services to ensure that those applications are available to the right people and not to the wrong people. Then the other areas they are really looking for AT&T to provide is an enterprise geared service into the mobility area. So, access to all of their applications, whether it’s through wireline or wireless – and maybe some help in managing both the cost of mobility and getting your arms around what that cost is – and then helping them reduce those expenses.
GOB: How do you provide the mobility aspect of it? Do you work with Canadian carriers, do you buy back haul? Do you deal with handsets? I’m not quite sure.
AM: Well, from a mobility perspective, it starts with the acquisition of Cingular which gives us an American carrier that’s now 100% owned by us.
So, we start building enterprise rates, services, from a mobility perspective that are available for the multi-national companies, but starting with what they’re doing in the U.S. And then, Cingular has the largest number of roaming agreements of any carrier, and we do offer a managed mobility service where we help customers actually pick the right plans and make sure they’re on the most efficient usage. As we’re looking for the next step of what we really want to do on a greater scale with mobility, there’s been some speculation about AT&T looking to acquire licenses, mobility licenses in India. But in my region, I think the next step is to figure out where we want to do something on a grander scale, both in Canada and Latin America.
GOB: Well, there’s a wireless spectrum auction coming up here next year.
AM: Yeah, we’ve had a lot of discussion about that. I wouldn’t speculate on whether we’re going to buy spectrum or do something through some sort of integration. But clearly mobility is a huge—one of the top issues for our customers and we want to have an enterprise grade mobility offer.
GOB: Now, when you’re talking about converged and secure networks, what is it that your customers are securing themselves from? I mean there’s a whole host of stuff isn’t there?
Stan Quintana (vice-president of AT&T Security Services): There are a number of areas of concern of risk that customers are facing, and if you take a look at the Internet-based types of risk that are out there today, and the services that AT&T is providing (such as Internet Protect) to address these types of risk – they exist in several fashions… for example denial of service types of attacks.
We’re seeing substantial, substantial denial of service attacks against specific customers – very high revenue generating web sites. Essentially what’s happening with these customers is this is organized crime for the most part coming out of, for example, the Eastern Block countries.
GOB: Can you give me an example or anything like that?
SQ: I have a whole bunch of examples. I can’t tell you the name of the financial firm, but we have a number of financial firms that essentially have been under attack. And essentially it has brought down their financial sides where customers are unable to complete financial transactions of various kinds. And what happens is these hackers call the company and they ask for some ransom, to deposit dollars into certain foreign accounts before they’ll alleviate the attack.
GOB: Does the ransom work? Do the companies pay it and then turn to you?
SQ: Some of the companies have paid the ransom. And then they turn to us. A lot of the companies come to us during the attack. One latest case of a financial firm a couple weeks ago, they were under substantial attack and they came to us. All we needed was a faxed letter that they would allow us to mitigate the attacks. And we went ahead and did it and within 20 minutes. So, we’re able to do it very, very quickly because it’s a networked based policy driven type of platform.
GOB: Tell me a little bit, too, about the predictive nature of your service.
SQ: We have this substantial knowledge-mining capability. We mine about 10 Terabytes (trillion bytes) of information on a daily basis. So, with that in our capability that we’ve developed, we’re able to see the formation of actual denial of service attacks, we’re actually able to see the precursor activity, the precursor worm formation and virus formation in the network.
With that capability, we can essentially instantly start to route the traffic into the mitigation platform so when the attack comes full force, we’re able to delete the bad packets and just let the good ones flow through to the customer’s environment and not affect their environment.
AM: And it’s interesting with the (example Quintana cited), there were kind of several benefits. Obviously, the most obvious one, which is getting rid of the attack and stopping that. But, what the customer found out is also today if they put those platforms on their premises, their access types are being utilized by both good and bad packets, right?
So, when you do that mitigation in the network, what’s going down the pipes now are just good information. So, there’s actually a reduction in cost by taking all the bad stuff out in the network. And the same is true with e-mail. We’re able to get rid of 80% of the e-mail on the network and only hand off to them the stuff that’s meaningful.
GOB: These are large multi-national corporations, heavily reliant on the Internet with thousands and thousands of employees, many of whom are surfing and downloading and doing all sorts of things that may be taxing to the networks. How do you deal with that aspect of it?
SQ: In our network services, we have essentially three classes of mitigation platforms. One is the denial of service platform. Another is the embedded e-mail scanning that we do and filtering that we do which looks not only at spam but anti-viruses. And then the third is around the other protocols, the web-based protocols that you just alluded to. So for example, we have this web security platform, it’s a gateway platform in the cloud that if a customer buys this, they’re able to put policy in place all the way down to the level of the individual.
The company is able to control what sites through URL filtering they go to, number one. And more importantly what they can do is now the inbound response is coming back is looked at before it ever gets to the customer environment, for viruses and for spyware. And that’s a substantial advantage because now we’re starting to filter out those viruses and that spyware for web-based requests right at the gateway before it ever gets to the customer.
We can also actually filter out and control the instant messaging environment that a customer uses, too. So for example if a corporation says I only want you to use my internal IM messaging system and I only want the following kinds of information associated with it, (we’ll) filter that and stop that (outside) message from going through.
GOB: Andrea, are there differences between Canadian requirements and other country requirements around the world? What do you see as key differences in the networks and where businesses are in terms of dealing with the Internet, when you compare it to other countries that AT&T serves around the world?
AM: That’s a great question. I don’t really see a difference in the requirements, but what we do see… is that Canadian multi-nationals have been a little slower adopting the converged technologies. I think the average was 37% of firms in Canada have implemented converged IT platforms, but it’s about 48% globally.
They’ve been a little slower, a little more cautious. However, there’s a higher recognition in Canada – about 77% of the companies surveyed – for the need to move to IT networks as critical to their business, compared to about 70% globally. And a lot of the Canadian companies cited security concerns as one of the reasons they were a little slower in the adoption.
GOB: How many new security threats do you see arise everyday Stan, on a global basis?
SQ: We’re seeing in the same level of Internet-based worms and viruses as we’ve seen over the past number of years… They continue to hit us. But what we’re seeing a lot more of are very, very focused attacks, the commercial grade types of attacks like those denial of service ones. And more importantly, we’re seeing a lot more of the hidden worms and viruses, that spyware, malware types of worms and viruses that are penetrating and stealing very, very valuable private information from corporations. That is substantially on the rise.
GOB: And you see more of it attacking corporations than attacking individuals?
SQ: Attacking corporations, yes. What we’re seeing is that individual consumer-types of workstations are being used as essentially bots for the botnets that are out there for these different types of attacks.
AM: And, when the viruses or worms were first launched in a testing mode kind of until they hit the network – it took weeks. And now… it’s days or hours.
SQ: So the velocity of propagation of the worm is starting to substantially increase. If you go back, for example, to one of the major worms – in 2003, when Slammer hit… on January 25, 2003… we saw the precursor activity to Slammer on January 2nd – almost three weeks in advance to the actual propagation of the work. Well, in today’s environment, the worms that we’re seeing now, the viruses, sometimes we see them in hours in advance of the propagation.
GOB: So, we’ve talked all this while about AT&T and no one’s mentioned iPhone.
AM: It’s really slick.
SQ: It’s cool.
AM: It’s breaking all kinds of sales records, so you know we’re very, very pleased with the way it’s performing.
GOB: Now you just need to knock off some of those foreign ownership rules to bring that thing up to Canada right?
AM: Oh gosh from your mouth to God’s ears, I’ll tell you.
